Stitching things together

Uplifting alternatives to manifesting anxious bunnies

On a gorgeous day in Kendall Square last week I took a walk to get lunch. It was 70 degrees—25 degrees cooler than two days prior—so when I happened upon this balled-up bunny, I wondered if it was confused. But it didn’t look confused. It looked anxious, scared, even as it was leaving itself recklessly exposed. It squatted there stock-still as if carved out of wood as people rushed by. No one else seemed to notice it so for a split second, I wondered if I was imagining it, manifesting it from my own malaise. In case anyone else is feeling it too, I thought I’d share some things I’ve found uplifting recently.

First, I learned from the Substack Your Local Epidemiologist that a group of public health professionals had started sitting down with supporters of the grassroots movement Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) to hear each other out. The conversation was hosted by the podcast Why Should I Trust You? and it continues in various ways to this day.

Science writer Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, put it well when he said that the problem isn’t that we have science skeptics. We should all be skeptical about science. We should be framing our challenges “not as being anti-science, but being pro-power and pro-profit.” But even that isn’t simple when you consider that, for example, the immunotherapy revolution that stunned us all by sending Jimmy Carter’s stage 4 melanoma into remission might have never made it out of Jim Allison’s academic lab if not for its ability to make a profit. And this is true of just about any life-saving medication. Profit isn’t a dirty word. It’s why people disclose conflicts of interest all the time. Just because someone makes money from science doesn’t mean they necessarily put profit in front of people. Former Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins came on the Why Should I Trust You podcast and talked about this. He doesn’t think we should stop talking about getting the model right, and there is certainly room for improvement. But it is also true that medicines from this system—and from Collins’ life work—now allow cystic fibrosis patients to plan their lives, not their funerals. And this is true of more diseases all the time.

The post describing the meeting between public health experts and MAHA advocates includes a screenshot of the Zoom call. I was deeply moved by it. On a recent visit back to Indiana, I saw a quilted table runner being gifted from one friend to another on the banks of the river near where I grew up. Having just written about how paintings were how I say I love you, I thought, a hand-made quilt is the quintessential I-love-you art, isn’t it? I imagined sewing a quilt using fabric printed with the squares of the participants’ not-mad-looking heads from the Zoom screenshot, because they all found a way to say I love you to humanity by being there. Nothing seems more wholesome than quilt-making until you consider that it is, technically speaking, violently stabbing fabric with a sharp needle over and over, accompanied by an incessant and monotonous sound drowning out even your own thoughts, which is how it can feel to listen to people we disagree with. But if we pan out, maybe we can see that listening is what it takes to stitch us back together. Then I started seeing this thread all over.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a book event for my brilliant friend Lisa S. Gardiner’s new book Reefs of Time: What Fossils Reveal About Coral Survival, on what fossilized coral reefs can teach us about Earth’s past and future. An audience member asked her for tips on getting people to care about climate change. She lamented that there was no good answer to this but described her own place-based approach. It’s admittedly hard to scale, but when she’s talking to farmers in Nebraska, she’s talking about weather. On the coast of Louisiana, it’s about sea level rise and pollution. To get someone to care about something, you have to know what they already care about, and that comes with listening.

Journalist and liberal daughter of Republican parents Mónica Guzmán came onto my radar years ago when I heard her say that we can’t be curious and judgmental at the same time—that these are two different modes. I was skeptical, so I tried it. She was right. I recommend her 2022 book I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. And now I’ve just learned that she is involved in Braver Angels, an organization that is on a mission to catalyze these conversations by actively bringing people together from opposite sides of the divide.

Finally, this isn’t a recent discovery, but I was reminded of Sally Kohn’s 2018 book The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide for Repairing Our Humanity. It is a twist on Elie Wiesel’s famous quote that “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”. Sally argues convincingly—and with deep research into the evolution and psychology of hate—that the opposite of hate is connection. She is a liberal political commentator and has been a contributor on Fox News. She’s drawn no small amount of criticism, but a touching story in her book describes reaching out to people who’d been trolling her on social media. For those she could coax out from under the bridge, she found them surprised that they weren’t being pulled out for a slap on the wrist, and all the more chastened for it. She found a shared humanity that she could easily extrapolate to those she couldn’t coax out.

The sidewalk bunny that launched this reverie reminded me of how similar fear and anger look. And even as I wanted to help it (knowing it didn’t want my help), I also imagined it seizing on me as I walked by like a scene out of Monty Python. But mostly, I was curious. And that feels like a good start.